Nigeria, in order to build resilience and tackle food insecurity through raising agricultural productivity and food production, launched the Agricultural Transformation Agenda in 2012. The overall goals are to add 20 million metric tons of food to the domestic food supply by 2015, create 3.5 million jobs and to become a net exporter of food, Adesina has said.
Calestous Juma, director of the Science, Technology and Globalization Project at the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said there is a "new generation" of African leaders focusing on agricultural transformation.
"Political leadership is a key driver of agricultural investment in Africa," said Juma. "This should now be followed by long-term national and regional policies that guarantee consistency in government commitment to agriculture. This is a key role that the African Union can play by maintaining focus on agricultural policy over the next two decades."
Juma, author of the 2011 book "The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa" has said that Africa, which has the largest share of the world's uncultivated land, can feed itself in a generation and be able to export products to other regions of the world. But he said doing so would require concerted investments in infrastructure, technical training and creation of regional as well as new international markets.
"Innovation in mobile communication, crop insurance, post-harvest loss reduction and other risk-reducing incentives will be essential for raising agricultural productivity," Juma said. "But the most important investments will be rural infrastructure - power, roads, irrigation and telecoms - and political commitment."
Last July, the Rockefeller Foundation hosted a summit in Abuja, Nigeria, titled 'Realising the Potential of Africa's Agriculture: Catalytic Innovations for Growth", which brought together agriculture and finance ministers, along with other leaders from more than 23 African nations to identify concrete ways to strengthen African agricultural markets and 'value chains' to benefit smallholder farmers.
The summit was part of a series of global convenings hosted by the Foundation during its centennial year.
Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, has said that across the continent there has been a renewed commitment from governments, non-governmental organisations and the private sector to move agriculture from a development challenge to a business opportunity.

After the agriculture heyday of 30 years ago the sector got scant attention especially from African presidents whose nations were well endowed with natural resources like oil-rich Nigeria But many African leaders are returning to a focus on what their nations can grow Nigeria for example was once a major exporter of groundnuts or peanuts cocoa and other crops and it was food secure It grew all its people needed to eat But last year Nigeria spent over U.S.$70 billion importing food including products made from such crops as tomatoes that can grow in abundance in Nigeria Nigeria's agriculture minister Akinwumi Adesina whose doctorate from an American university is in agricultural economics is one of the new leaders determined to reverse that food dependence